By Ben Hatke
Jack trades his mom's car keys for a box of strange seeds, and the garden that grows tries to swallow the whole summer.
Jack is stuck home all summer minding his little sister Maddy while their mom works two jobs. Maddy almost never speaks, until a wild-eyed man at the flea market offers a box of seeds, and Maddy tells Jack to trade for them. He does, with their mom's car keys. The seeds grow overnight into a garden of impossible, snapping, glowing plants, some helpful, some hungry, some downright dangerous. With his fierce neighbor Lilly, Jack has to figure out what the garden wants before it takes something he can't get back.
From the same hands as Zita the Spacegirl, this has a bit more shadow in it, and that's the appeal for a child who has outgrown pure-silly comics and wants something with real stakes and real feeling. The garden is gorgeous and unsettling, the sword fights are exciting, and underneath all of it is a big brother trying to protect a sister he doesn't always understand. It reads fast the way all Hatke books do, so a child who wants more STORY than joke gets it here without hitting a wall of text.